The Iron Yuppie

Election result maps I guess I'm wrong. We're not living in a red, blue or purple country. We're living in a freaky misshapen country which is slowly growing and taking over everything it sees. Run!

I got in an interesting discussion last week about my comments about the election. I'm paraphrasing here, but the person who disagreed felt like I was exacerbating small differences between the two halves of the electorate. This could very much be the case. Also, I do not want, in any way, for my comments to say that I think I'm smarter than the people who voted the other way. Not at all! I don't, and I do not think ANYONE will, know the rationale for people voting the way they did for some time if ever. Yes, "moral values" were highlighted by the polls, but so were terrorism, Iraq and so on, and no one trusts the exit polls anyway.

If there was one thing that this election continued to highlight for me, it is that we live in an irrational country. I do my best to follow reason, but time and again I see the vast majority of people choosing to behave irrationally (some would say emotionally). People probably chose on this election based on terrorism and Iraq as much as anything, yet these are hardly the most concerning issues of our time (I would say heart disease and/or cancer would be greater threats by orders of magnitude). Yesterday, I wandered through the auto show in Seattle, and you have these enormous trucks for people who never use them. "But my grandmother flies in once a year and we need the extra room to drive her around!" God forbid you rent a car that one week. Marketing certainly helps push us in this direction, be it election or not, but we can all do a lot better. I wonder what long term effect this will have on market forces and the ability to predict market forces? Since irrationality is non-quantifiable, how do you evaluate a population’s ability to do trade offs?